In an April article called "Google+ Is Walking
Dead," TechCrunch said employees on the
Hangouts and Photos teams would be leaving G+ to join Android,
and that Google was starting to think of Google+ as more of a platform than a
product, ending its competition with Facebook or Twitter.

But Besbris says Google+ isn't going away any time soon
though.

"The company is behind it," he says. "I have no idea where these
rumors come from, to be honest with you."

He also says G+ was never trying to compete with Facebook,
anyway.

"I think people come to Google+ with this expectation that it’s
going to be Google’s attempt to do some other product — we’re
doing this to compete with somebody and it must be something like
that," he told Wagner. "That’s not actually how we compete with
products. We don’t go into [certain] industries because somebody
else is doing something important. We go in because we want to
make users happy, because we see some software out there that’s
scratching some itches."

He ended the interview by saying that Google doesn't think that
there's "an end game" for Google+ and that the company is in
social for the long haul.